Tancred Part 23

'Pray, are you of those Franks who wors.h.i.+p a Jewess; or of those other who revile her, break her images, and blaspheme her pictures?'

'I venerate, though I do not adore, the mother of G.o.d,' said Tancred, with emotion.

'Ah! the mother of Jesus!' said his companion. 'He is your G.o.d. He lived much in this village. He was a great man, but he was a Jew; and you wors.h.i.+p him.'

'And you do not wors.h.i.+p him?' said Tancred, looking up to her with an inquiring glance, and with a reddening cheek.

'It sometimes seems to me that I ought,' said the lady, 'for I am of his race, and you should sympathise with your race.'

'You are, then, a Hebrew?'

'I am of the same blood as Mary whom you venerate, but do not adore.'

'You just now observed,' said Tancred, after a momentary pause, 'that it sometimes almost seems to you that you ought to acknowledge my Lord and Master. He made many converts at Bethany, and found here some of his gentlest disciples. I wish that you had read the history of his life.'

'I have read it. The English bishop here has given me the book. It is a good one, written, I observe, entirely by Jews. I find in it many things with which I agree; and if there be some from which I dissent, it may be that I do not comprehend them.'

'You are already half a Christian!' said Tancred, with animation.

'But the Christianity which I draw from your book does not agree with the Christianity which you practise,' said the lady, 'and I fear, therefore, it may be heretical.'

'The Christian Church would be your guide.'

'Which?' inquired the lady; 'there are so many in Jerusalem. There is the good bishop who presented me with this volume, and who is himself a Hebrew: he is a Church; there is the Latin Church, which was founded by a Hebrew; there is the Armenian Church, which belongs to an Eastern nation who, like the Hebrews, have lost their country and are scattered in every clime; there is the Abyssinian Church, who hold us in great honour, and practise many of our rites and ceremonies; and there are the Greek, the Maronite, and the Coptic Churches, who do not favour us, but who do not treat us as grossly as they treat each other. In this perplexity it may be wise to remain within the pale of a church older than all of them, the church in which Jesus was born and which he never quitted, for he was born a Jew, lived a Jew, and died a Jew; as became a Prince of the House of David, which you do and must acknowledge him to have been. Your sacred genealogies prove the fact; and if you could not establish it, the whole fabric of your faith falls to the ground.'

'If I had no confidence in any Church,' said Tancred, with agitation, 'I would fall down before G.o.d and beseech him to enlighten me; and, in this land,' he added, in a tone of excitement, 'I cannot believe that the appeal to the Mercy-seat would be made in vain.'

'But human wit ought to be exhausted before we presume to invoke divine interposition,' said the lady. 'I observe that Jesus was as fond of asking questions as of performing miracles; an inquiring spirit will solve mysteries. Let me ask you: you think that the present state of my race is penal and miraculous?'

Tancred gently bowed a.s.sent.

'Why do you?' asked the lady.

'It is the punishment ordained for their rejection and crucifixion of the Messiah.'

'Where is it ordained?'

'Upon our heads and upon our children be his blood.'

'The criminals said that, not the judge. Is it a principle of your jurisprudence to permit the guilty to a.s.sign their own punishment?

They might deserve a severer one. Why should they transfer any of the infliction to their posterity? What evidence have you that Omnipotence accepted the offer? It is not so announced in your histories. Your evidence is the reverse. He, whom you acknowledge as omnipotent, prayed to Jehovah to forgive them on account of their ignorance. But, admit that the offer was accepted, which in my opinion is blasphemy, is the cry of a rabble at a public execution to bind a nation? There was a great party in the country not disinclined to Jesus at the time, especially in the provinces where he had laboured for three years, and on the whole with success; are they and their children to suffer? But you will say they became Christians. Admit it. We were originally a nation of twelve tribes; ten, long before the advent of Jesus, had been carried into captivity and scattered over the East and the Mediterranean world; they are probably the source of the greater portion of the existing Hebrews; for we know that, even in the time of Jesus, Hebrews came up to Jerusalem at the Pa.s.sover from every province of the Roman Empire. What had they to do with the crucifixion or the rejection?'

'The fate of the Ten Tribes is a deeply interesting question,' said Tancred; 'but involved in, I fear, inexplicable-obscurity. In England there are many who hold them to be represented by the Afghans, who state that their ancestors followed the laws of Moses. But perhaps they ceased to exist and were blended with their conquerors.'

'The Hebrews have never blended with their conquerors,' said the lady, proudly. 'They were conquered frequently, like all small states situate amid rival empires. Syria was the battlefield of the great monarchies.

Jerusalem has not been conquered oftener than Athens, or treated worse; but its people, unhappily, fought too bravely and rebelled too often, so at last they were expatriated. I hold that, to believe that the Hebrew communities are in a princ.i.p.al measure the descendants of the Ten Tribes, and of the other captivities preceding Christ, is a just, and fair, and sensible inference, which explains circ.u.mstances that otherwise could not be explicable. But let that pa.s.s. We will suppose all the Jews in all the cities of the world to be the lineal descendants of the mob who shouted at the crucifixion. Yet another question! My grandfather is a Bedouin sheikh, chief of one of the most powerful tribes of the desert. My mother was his daughter. He is a Jew; his whole tribe are Jews; they read and obey the five books, live in tents, have thousands of camels, ride horses of the Nedjed breed, and care for nothing except Jehovah, Moses, and their mares. Were they at Jerusalem at the crucifixion, and does the shout of the rabble touch them? Yet my mother marries a Hebrew of the cities, and a man, too, fit to sit on the throne of King Solomon; and a little Christian Yahoor with a round hat, who sells figs at Smyrna, will cross the street if he see her, lest he should be contaminated by the blood of one who crucified his Saviour; his Saviour being, by his own statement, one of the princes of our royal house. No; I will never become a Christian, if I am to eat such sand! It is not to be found in your books. They were written by Jews, men far too well acquainted with their subject to indite such tales of the Philistines as these!'

Tancred looked at her with deep interest as her eye flashed fire, and her beautiful cheek was for a moment suffused with the crimson cloud of indignant pa.s.sion; and then he said, 'You speak of things that deeply interest me, or I should not be in this land. But tell me: it cannot be denied that, whatever the cause, the miracle exists; and that the Hebrews, alone of the ancient races, remain, and are found in every country, a memorial of the mysterious and mighty past.'

'Their state may be miraculous without being penal. But why miraculous?

Is it a miracle that Jehovah should guard his people? And can He guard them better than by endowing them with faculties superior to those of the nations among whom they dwell?'

'I cannot believe that merely human agencies could have sustained a career of such duration and such vicissitudes.'

'As for human agencies, we have a proverb: "The will of man is the servant of G.o.d." But if you wish to make a race endure, rely upon it you should expatriate them. Conquer them, and they may blend with their conquerors; exile them, and they will live apart and for ever.

To expatriate is purely oriental, quite unknown to the modern world. We were speaking of the Armenians, they are Christians, and good ones, I believe.'

'I have understood very orthodox.' 'Go to Armenia, and you will not find an Armenian. They, too, are an expatriated nation, like the Hebrews. The Persians conquered their land, and drove out the people. The Armenian has a proverb: "In every city of the East I find a home." They are everywhere; the rivals of my people, for they are one of the great races, and little degenerated: with all our industry, and much of our energy; I would say, with all our human virtues, though it cannot be expected that they should possess our divine qualities; they have not produced G.o.ds and prophets, and are proud that they can trace up their faith to one of the obscurest of the Hebrew apostles, and who never knew his great master.'

'But the Armenians are found only in the East,' said Tancred.

'Ah!' said the lady, with a sarcastic smile; 'it is exile to Europe, then, that is the curse: well, I think you have some reason. I do not know much of your quarter of the globe: Europe is to Asia what America is to Europe. But I have felt the winds of the Exuine blowing up the Bosphorus; and, when the Sultan was once going to cut off our heads for helping the Egyptians, I pa.s.sed some months at Vienna. Oh! how I sighed for my beautiful Damascus!'

'And for your garden at Bethany?' said Tancred.

'It did not exist then. This is a recent creation,' said the lady. 'I have built a nest in the c.h.i.n.k of the hills, that I might look upon Arabia; and the palm tree that invited you to honour my domain was the contribution of my Arab grandfather to the only garden near Jerusalem.

But I want to ask you another question. What, on the whole, is the thing most valued in Europe?'

Tancred pondered; and, after a slight pause, said, 'I think I know what ought to be most valued in Europe; it is something very different from what I fear I must confess is most valued there. My cheek burns while I say it; but I think, in Europe, what is most valued is money.'

'On the whole,' said the lady, 'he that has most money there is most honoured?'

'Practically, I apprehend so.'

'Which is the greatest city in Europe?'

'Without doubt, the capital of my country, London.'

'Greater I know it is than Vienna; but is it greater than Paris?'

'Perhaps double the size of Paris.'

'And four times that of Stamboul! What a city! Why 'tis Babylon! How rich the most honoured man must be there! Tell me, is he a Christian?'

'I believe he is one of your race and faith.' 'And in Paris; who is the richest man in Paris?' 'The brother, I believe, of the richest man in London.'

'I know all about Vienna,' said the lady, smiling. 'Caesar makes my countrymen barons of the empire, and rightly, for it would fall to pieces in a week without their support. Well, you must admit that the European part of the curse has not worked very fatally.'

'I do not see,' said Tancred thoughtfully, after a short pause, 'that the penal dispersion of the Hebrew nation is at all essential to the great object of the Christian scheme. If a Jew did not exist, that would equally have been obtained.'

'And what do you hold to be the essential object of the Christian scheme?' 'The Expiation.'

'Ah!' said the lady, in a tone of much solemnity, 'that is a great idea; in harmony with our instincts, with our traditions, our customs. It is deeply impressed upon the convictions of this land. Shaped as you Christians offer the doctrine, it loses none of its sublimity; or its a.s.sociations, full at the same time of mystery, power, and solace. A sacrificial Mediator with Jehovah, that expiatory intercessor born from the chosen house of the chosen people, yet blending in his inexplicable nature the divine essence with the human elements, appointed before all time, and purifying, by his atoning blood, the myriads that preceded and the myriads that will follow us, without distinction of creed or clime, this is what you believe. I acknowledge the vast conception, dimly as my brain can partially embrace it. I understand thus much: the human race is saved; and, without the apparent agency of a Hebrew prince, it could not have been saved. Now tell me: suppose the Jews had not prevailed upon the Romans to crucify Jesus, what would have become of the Atonement?'

'I cannot permit myself to contemplate such contingencies,' said Tancred. 'The subject is too high for me to touch with speculation.

I must not even consider an event that had been pre-ordained by the Creator of the world for countless ages.'

'Ah!' said the lady; 'pre-ordained by the Creator of the world for countless ages! Where, then, was the inexpiable crime of those who fulfilled the beneficent intention? The holy race supplied the victim and the immolators. What other race could have been entrusted with such a consummation? Was not Abraham prepared to sacrifice even his son? And with such a doctrine, that embraces all s.p.a.ce and time; nay more, chaos and eternity; with divine persons for the agents, and the redemption of the whole family of man for the subject; you can mix up the miserable persecution of a single race! And this is practical, not doctrinal Christianity. It is not found in your Christian books, which were all written by Jews; it must have been made by some of those Churches to which you have referred me. Persecute us! Why, if you believe what you profess, you should kneel to us! You raise statues to the hero who saves a country. We have saved the human race, and you persecute us for doing it.'